Aug

1

Looks like Marty Kaplan hit the nail on the head with his biting commentary on McCain’s “Obama is a celebrity’ ad. I can buy the racist angle as an after-thought, but if I were going for a ‘he’s going to despoil your daughters’ gut reaction, Britney and Paris would be the last celebrities I’d choose for that. The McCain ad equates Obama with the two spoiled-brat celebs that are universally recognized as being both dumb and self-serving, not to mention rude, unsavory and totally without class. The ad invokes the birds-of-a-feather principle by putting Obama in the same class.

At the same time, it completely deflects attention from the fact that the political content of the ad is tumbled through the spin-cycle so that Obama’s opposition to offshore drilling is painted as a desire to keep the US dependent on foreign oil. Because we all know that the moment we agree to offshore drilling, gas prices will come tumbling down because we’ll have billions of barrels of domestic oil and we won’t have to give up our gas-guzzling SVUs in favor of actually developing alternative energy sources.

I, for one, would love to see the media (and the rest of us) stop focusing on the CAMPAIGN and start paying attention to the ISSUES.

Kaplan says,

Don’t forget: the people behind McCain loathed Bobby and Martin at the time. Today, they’ll do anything they can to make it feel embarrassing to imagine that those leaders might have an heir in Obama. The message of McCain’s ads is that change is for chumps, belief is for boobs, fame is for charlatans, and that the calendar in America will be forever set on Groundhog Day 1968 until all the war protesters, uppity women, tree-huggers, faggots and dirty f*****g hippies finally go back to the places where they belong.

I have my concerns with Obama. He was not my first choice, and frankly, if I didn’t fear that not voting for Obama would amount to a vote for McCain, I wouldn’t vote for him even now. It’s not that I don’t believe he is what he says he is – it’s that I think he needs a little more time in the fire before we can stick a fork in him and call him done.

I do believe in baby steps, though, no matter how much I’d like to invest in huge leaps forward. And I do believe in giant steps backward, and electing McCain would catapult this country 40 years into a past that I, for one, prefer not to relive. I was part of the generation that fought for every one of those baby steps, and I don’t want my daughters to have to fight to regain them. We fought those battles, we won those victories, and I want my daughters to be able to take it for granted that they have a right to contraception – without their husband’s permission and without the approval of big business. I want them to know that they have a right to the same employment opportunities that are available to men. I want health care for them that focuses on their needs, not just the needs of a normal white male.

Likewise, I want my sons and daughters both to have the option of working in a unionized workplace without having to go back to the 1930s and re-fight the battle for the right to form unions and employ collective bargaining. I want my children and grandchildren to live in a world where technology has led to cleaner sources of energy that leave them something of a world to enjoy. I want my children to have the OPTION of joining the military, and the responsibility to serve their country in another way if it conflicts with their morals. I want my children to have the choice of spending their lives with the person (or persons) that they love, without regard to race or gender when it comes to granting official, legal rights.

I want them to treasure these rights and use them as a base to continue working toward a fair and just world – but I greatly fear that a McCain victory would put them in the position of having to fight those battles all over again. That’s why this uppity, tree-hugging, faggot-loving hippie woman is going to vote for Obama in November, despite the fact that he isn’t quite the president I’d have ordered if I had my druthers.